


path to paradise (likewise the road to ruin)

by thecloserkin (tabacoychanel)



Category: Locke & Key (TV)
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, F/M, POV Outsider, Sibling Incest, bode is canonically VERY DISCERNING for his age ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:28:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23688439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tabacoychanel/pseuds/thecloserkin
Summary: Tyler and Kinsey keep a lot of things from Bode.
Relationships: Bode Locke & Kinsey Locke & Tyler Locke, Kinsey Locke/Tyler Locke
Comments: 7
Kudos: 39





	path to paradise (likewise the road to ruin)

“Remember that all worlds draw to an end.” —C.S. Lewis.

:::

Key House was built on secrets. Bode didn’t object to secrets in themselves. He liked exploring; he liked crawling into dusty attics and wardrobes and finding new keys and discovering their uses and sharing his discoveries with his siblings. What was the point of secrets if not to pass them along like limited-edition Legos to people you trusted? But Tyler and Kinsey did not always share their discoveries with him. They kept plenty of things from him—sometimes because they were afraid he might get hurt, and sometimes just because they could. Maybe it was a disease that grown-up people got. Maybe Tyler and Kinsey were in a hurry to sail over the horizon into adulthood and leave Bode stranded in an empty house with a handful of keys and a headful of secrets and nobody to tell them to.

It wasn’t fair. They wouldn’t even have _known_ about the keys if not for Bode. But did Bode get a thank-you? Did Bode get a say in the family strategy to defeat the demon-from-another-dimension? Did Tyler and Kinsey even consult Bode about _anything_? They did not. They went around making up rules about who got to use which keys when, and breaking all the rules just as fast as they made them up. They pretended to know what they were doing when in reality they had _no flipping idea_. Then again, if Mom was anything to go by, grown-ups did not as a rule know what they were doing.

“Where’s Mom?” he asked when he found her seat empty at breakfast.

Kinsey was flipping an omelette. Tyler poured a glass of orange juice and set it down in front of Bode. “She’s at that expo, you know the once-a-year trade show for restoration experts.”

Bode frowned. “The one in Vegas?”

“Uncle Duncan dropped her off at the airport earlier.”

“Why didn’t she say anything? She was supposed to help me with my science fair project this weekend.”

“It’s Mom. You know how she is, Bode. She left us a note and a grocery list.”

“Omelettes are ready,” said Kinsey.

“You make them too eggy.” Bode crossed his arms over his chest.

“What, you think Mom would have made them better?”

“No, but Dad would.”

Neither of them had anything to say to that. Dad had been a spectacular chef. Dad was the reason Mom couldn’t cook worth a damn, and they all knew it. After a minute Tyler got up to grab a box of cereal from the pantry and fill a bowl for Bode. He didn’t add any milk—he knew Bode liked to mix it himself. “Hey, how about this. I’ll take you over to Rufus’s house and he can help you with your project. Seems like it would be right in his wheelhouse, yeah?”

“I don’t know. He might be busy today. We’d have to ask his mom for permission.”

“Already called her,” said Kinsey. “She said it’s fine.”

Bode narrowed his eyes. “You didn’t even know I had a science fair project until five minutes ago.” Kinsey and Tyler exchanged a look, and Bode thought _here we go again_. “I can tell when you guys are keeping stuff from me, you know. I’m not stupid, or a _baby_ or something.”

“We know that,” Kinsey agreed, and now the two of them were carefully _not_ looking at each other, which was almost as bad.

“Then why do you shut me out? What’s the real reason you want me out of the house? Because if it’s so you can find more keys without telling me, that’s not playing fair.”

Tyler crouched down so his eyes were level with Bode’s. “I promise we won’t look for keys without you. I swear it on Dad’s ashes.”

“And when you come back tonight, we’ll order pizza. You pick the topping.”

Bode nodded, uncertain. “Tonight? You mean I’ll be gone all day?”

“I already talked to Ellie,” Kinsey began impatiently.

“It’s not just the keys. I mean the keys are part of it. Ever since we moved here and all this crazy stuff started happening I’ve been spending tons of time with you guys. I … I _like_ hanging out with you guys.”

Kinsey expression went sort of soft, and Tyler said, “Bode, how many friends do you have? Other than Rufus, I mean. Kids from school, kids your own age?”

“I guess it’s just Rufus.”

“Well, I have the hockey team, and Kinsey has her weird theater kids—“

“—ex _cuse_ me, who are you calling—”

“—and we want you to have friends, too. We think you’re amazing, and we think more people deserve to know it.”

There was a tightness in Bode’s chest that he found hard to explain. When Kinsey added, “We want you to have friends, but we want you to come home at the end of the day. We’ll always be here for you, buddy,” he thought his ribcage might actually burst open from the sudden pressure.

:::

Tyler had taken to wearing Dad’s flannel jacket. He wore the baseball cap that Dad had used for fishing, and he wore Dad’s belts. One afternoon Bode nearly tripped over a pair of Dad’s work boots in the foyer. He stomped into the kitchen to vent at Kinsey about it.

“You know when Tyler reads _Coraline_ to me he doesn’t even do the voices right? Dad would do _all_ the voices.”

“You’re old enough to read it yourself,” she pointed out.

“Sure, but he offered. It’s like he’s trying so hard to be Dad, and he’s just …not.”

Kinsey slid a sheet of paper between the pages of her textbook to mark her place before closing it. “He’s been doing that for ages. You only just noticed?”

“He’s getting worse. Did you see mom’s face when she saw him wearing Dad’s jacket? Like she’d seen a ghost.”

“If _Mom_ hasn’t said anything to him…”

“If we let _Mom_ call the shots around here, they’d have shut off the electricity and the water and put us in foster care. It has to be you, Kinsey. He listens to you.”

She pressed her lips into a thin line. “Not lately.”

“Please. I don’t think it’s good for him, carrying so much around.”

A smile fluttered at the corner of her mouth. “When did my little brother turn into such a wise owl?”

“You’ll talk to him?”

“I will, for all the good it’ll do. You don’t get it. Tyler saw it happen—he saw Dad get shot and Mom get shot and you and me hiding in the next room, and there was not _a single goddamn thing_ he could do about it. If he could have broken that door down with his bare hands he would have. But he couldn’t, so all he got to do was watch. And he feels like what happened was his fault, even though it’s not. He feels that Dad left us in his charge. That we’re his to protect. Sometimes he even tries to tell me who I can see or where I can go.” She snorted. “As if.”

Bode was surprised that Tyler would make the rookie mistake of telling Kinsey what to do; the surest way to get Kinsey to do something was usually to command her to do the exact opposite. “You don’t know how to get through to him,” Bode said wonderingly. “You really don’t. But can’t you read each other’s minds? Aren’t you and Tyler always trying to get rid of me so you can do, well, whatever it is you guys do?”

“That’s different. That’s not the same at all,” said Kinsey, who had turned an astonishing shade of red. “Listen. There are things that are just for me and Tyler, and things that are just for me and you. This is a me-and-you thing, okay? We’ll keep an eye on Tyler’s dad complex. It’ll be our secret.”

:::

The problem with going to Narnia was that eventually you had to come back, and then you would inevitably forget. The memories would fade to that sickly yellow color that old-timey photographs took on, and you couldn’t be entirely certain which parts had really happened and which parts you had made up. And then you and your siblings would make a silent pact never to bring up Narnia ever again for the rest of your lives. Because grown-up siblings did not talk to each other—at least, not about anything that mattered.

What had Uncle Duncan and Dad talked about? Bode tried to remember. They fixed cars. They drank beer. They went hiking or fishing and they played golf or basketball. Was that what lay ahead for Tyler and Kinsey and Bode? It did not bear contemplating.

 _There’s a way to return to Narnia_ , he recalled. It was a one-way ticket, but as long as they all went together—as long as they all _wanted_ to go—it could be done. And the best time to start laying the groundwork for it was while they were still in Narnia.

:::

For a week after Sam came to their house and held their family at gunpoint, Tyler had difficulty letting any of them out of his sight. He would follow Mom from room to room while trying not to be too obvious about it. He would drive over to Kinsey’s friends’ houses to check on her. He and Bode played so much Mario Kart that Bode, for the first time in his life, grew heartily sick of staring at a screen. “Serious question, Ty?”

“Shoot.”

“What makes us special?”

“Whoah, that got really deep really fast.”

“I mean, if Sam wasn’t special, if Dodge could just take the keys off of him the way she can’t take them off of us …there’s something different about our family, isn’t there?”

“Yeah, something that draws psycho murderers like moths to flame,” muttered Tyler in an undertone Bode was pretty sure he wasn’t meant to hear. “First of all, I wouldn’t take anything that b—blatantly evil lady says at face value. Just because _she_ says Sam is worthless doesn’t mean she’s right. Sam wasn’t well, but he wasn’t rotten all the way through, either. Second of all, I already know you’re special. You and Mom and Kinsey, you’re everything I have. You’re irreplaceable.”

That wasn’t the kind of special he had meant. “Do you think if we’d stayed in Seattle, the keys would have stayed, like, asleep?”

“That’s impossible to know.”

“Do you _wish_ we’d stayed in Seattle?”

Tyler scrubbed a hand over his face. Bode held his breath. “Not anymore, no. I’m glad we’re here. Demons and ghosts and all.”

“Back in Seattle, you and Kinsey didn’t fight as much.”

“We don’t fight,” Tyler insisted reflexively.

“Uh-huh. You didn’t talk as much, either. Is fighting how you guys talk?”

“Bode….”

“Because you can talk to me, too. You don’t have to swaddle me in bubble-wrap.”

Tyler huffed an exasperated breath. “Easier than trying to swaddle Kinsey in bubble-wrap.”

“But she likes it!”

“…Likes what?”

“When you’re mean to her, when you boss her around, she likes it. It proves that you care.”

Tyler blinked. “I never thought about it that way.”

“She never comes to _my_ room at night, not even when I have nightmares.”

Tyler froze. “What do you mean?”

Bode pointed to the pile of laundry on Tyler’s bed. “Those are her pajama bottoms and that’s her underwear.”

“She’s ….been on a cleaning kick,” he offered weakly. “Oh, Jesus.”

“I’ll make you a deal. If you guys have to have secrets from me, fine, but don’t _lie_ about it, okay?”

“I—Yeah. Deal.”

“You wanna tell me why Kinsey sneaks into your room?”

“That’s not for me to tell, Bode. But I’ll tell you something else if you want. You’re not the only one who has nightmares. I get them too.”

Bode nodded thoughtfully. “Does Kinsey being here help?”

“Yeah. Yeah, actually, it does.”

:::

It took forever to finish a Monopoly game. By the time Kinsey had built her first hotel Bode had nodded off with his head in Tyler’s lap. They were in Kinsey’s room because it was the least cluttered. Bode had only just drifted back to consciousness when he heard Tyler say in an elaborately casual tone, “Gabe was here again yesterday.” Bode went very still.

Kinsey made a noise that meant she had heard the question but it did not merit a response.

“Has he been inside you?”

There was a sharp intake of breath. “None of your fucking business.”

“Has. He. Been. Inside. You?” Tyler demanded again, with such vehemence that Bode wondered if there was some kind of key that could unlock a person more intimately than the Head Key. What else could “inside” possibly mean?

“You don’t own me.”

“You wanna bet?” growled Tyler. He sounded like a dog warning another dog off his territory.

“Are you for real? You come home from banging the actual demon lady who’s trying to kill our whole family and you start on _me_?!“

“Keep your voice down, you’ll wake Bode,” he hissed. “I didn’t know it was her, all right? It didn’t mean anything.”

“What about Jackie, did she mean anything?” If Kinsey could spit venom she’d probably have done it before now, right? Poisonous saliva seemed like a useful skill set to have.

“Yes. That’s why I had to end it.”

“ _She_ dumped _you_.”

“Because I left her no choice. I couldn’t be with her and be here for you guys. I couldn’t be both; I had to choose.”

“Well, geez. Thank you for your sacrifice.”

“It wasn’t much of a choice. Jackie’s big on honesty, and lying by omission is still lying, isn’t that what Dad always said?”

“Do not bring Dad into this.”

“He’s the reason we’re here, though. He’s the reason we have these keys. He’s the reason supernatural beings are trying to take them from us. He’s …come to think of it, he’s the reason I am now the world’s foremost authority on the unfinished works of Jane Austen.”

“You fell hard for that Jackie, huh?” Kinsey sounded really, truly sad. Bode was beginning to get whiplash from how fast this conversation veered from hot to cold.

“Look,” said Tyler. “You realize none of those dorks in that whatever-it's-called-squad are good enough for you? You do realize that?”

“There’s not a boy alive who’s ‘good enough,’ and whose fault is that? _Who got there first_? Who ruined me for romantic relationships? Who starts a fistfight with anybody who even stands too close to me?”

“He was harassing you, for fuck’s sake.“

“Are you _blind_? It’s you, Tyler. It’s always been you. Not Scot, not Gabe. No one else, I promise, only you. Only ever you. Just remember that next time you tumble some bimbo in the backseat of your car.”

“Kinz,” he said softly. “You’re not ruined. Don’t say that.”

“Oh, but I am. Believe me, I am.”

:::

Ellie had said _We found a way to remember_. Bode wished she had stopped to mention what it was, before she disappeared. How had Ellie and Dad and all their friends warded off the forgetting? How had that earlier generation of Keepers of the Keys kept the memory of magic alive? Ellie had touched the spot beneath her collarbone the way you would touch a talisman, for reassurance. That gave Bode an idea.

Tyler and Kinsey were in the study, and they didn’t startle—much—when he burst in on them. Kinsey perched on the wing of Tyler’s armchair even though there were three other chairs she could have sat in. Bode was too excited to stay still, and he paced back and forth as the words tumbled out of him. “You remember asking Ellie why she didn’t forget her magical experiences, the way other grownups do?”

“Yeah?”

“You remember what she did next? She tapped her collarbone. Right here. That’s how they did it.”

“Did what?”

“Don’t you remember Dad’s scar? He had one in the exact same place. A little scar, shaped like a keyhole. Come on, you must have seen it.”

“I’m not sure it was shaped like a keyhole,” Tyler said doubtfully.

“What _else_ would it have been shaped like?”

Kinsey raised an eyebrow. “He has a point.”

Bode triumphantly produced the Matchstick Key from his pocket. “We can do it too. If it worked for Dad and Ellie and their friends, it’ll work for us. We’re the Keepers of the Keys now.”

Tyler had leapt up to snatch the key out of Bode’s open palm before he’d even finished his sentence, which was a very Tyler thing to do. “Seriously, Bode?”

“I wasn’t going to use it—not by myself. I’ve been carrying it around for two weeks, you know.”

Kinsey shook her head. “You want _us_ to use it on ourselves. All three of us.”

“Out of the question,” said Tyler. “Have you forgotten what happened to the last person to use that key on himself? Do you want Mom to come home to our skeletons, all crispy from lying in the sun? Because that’s what happened to the other guy.”

“He did that on purpose. All his friends were dead,” said Bode, reasonably. “What’s the point of being alive if there’s nobody who knows you, nobody who remembers?” Tyler seemed ready to object but Kinsey shushed him, and Bode went on, “You know when you show something magic to Mom or Uncle Duncan, and they only retain it for ten seconds? And then whatever-it-is comes along and wipes their memories clean? I don’t _ever_ want to see that blank look on either of your faces. Please, let’s make sure it never happens. Let’s do it before we grow up and it’s too late.” And that was it. That was his best pitch. He waited.

He got the very strong sense that Tyler and Kinsey wanted to hold hands, and were being careful not to. He tried to recall the last time he’d seen them holding hands, and came up empty. Which was strange. Brothers and sisters held hands all the time; Kinsey had held Bode's hand yesterday. Kinsey said, “Where would we do it? If we were going to use the Matchstick Key to brand ourselves.”

Tyler reached up, tapped one finger at the place where Kinsey's neck joined her shoulder. When she peeled her sweater back Bode gaped at the swelling thus revealed. Holy moly, those were bite marks. “Who did this to you? Has Tyler beat them up yet?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Bode glanced between Tyler’s impassive expression and Kinsey’s purpling bruise. “But won’t it hurt? If we do it right on top of your bruise, that’s gonna hurt like …a lot.”

“I _want_ it to hurt. That’s the point. I want it to hurt like a motherfucker; that way I’ll never, ever forget.” She looked straight at Tyler as she said it, so Bode knew the words were not for him. The temperature in the room probably dropped ten degrees.

Here was the thing about secrets: They did not portend only good things. ( _Up till then t_ _he keys had only brought good things into our lives_ , Ellie had said, tears stinging her eyes.) Pain and guilt were not good but they were necessary, and once they'd worked their way under your skin you could not toss them out without unzipping yourself and rearranging your insides. Tyler and Kinsey's insides were clearly a right mess, but Bode would not have exchanged the two of them, exactly as they were, for anybody else. "I knew you guys would come around," he said.

"You have to promise not to say anything to Mom about," Kinsey gestured at her shoulder.

"I haven't told her we have magic keys, I'm not going to tell her Tyler hurt you."

"How do you know it was--"

"Cause if anyone else left a bruise on her you would've broken all their bones by now."

Tyler swallowed.

"Wouldn't you?"

"Bode, there are things--"

"That you can't talk about. I know. Keep me in the dark like a potato, I don't care. Here's what else I know: You're mine, my brother and my sister. Promise that'll never change."

" _Bode_."

"Promise."

"That's what this Matchstick tattoo is about?" said Tyler.

"Seems like overkill. People have ex-wives and ex-boyfriends but you never hear about them having ex-siblings," Kinsey observed.

"Then why do you want to go through with it?"

She was silent.

"Admit it. You don't want to be ex-siblings with Tyler any more than I do."

This time her silence sounded like assent.


End file.
